Welcome to my blog. My name is Deborah. About 15 years ago, I bought an old home. We worked with several contractors to rehabilitate it, but ultimately, the foundation simply wasn't stable enough, and we had to tear it down. After that, we worked with a construction crew to build a home from the ground up. The experience was exciting and challenging, and I learned a lot through that process. I want to share construction and contracting facts and information with others so I decided to start this blog. I hope that you like the results, and I thank you for reading. Enjoy!
Here are two situations in which you should use (or have your contractor use) a ground-penetrating radar before doing any form of construction work.
You want to remove and rebuild your driveway
If you have a driveway that's in bad condition and you'd like to completely remove it and build a new one from scratch, then it might be helpful to have a contractor use a ground-penetrating radar on the existing driveway before you begin. This equipment could help your contractor to see the exact depth of the driveway's base layers before they begin breaking apart this structure. This, in turn, would ensure that they don't waste time pushing their jackhammer too deeply into the ground when breaking up the driveway.
Even more importantly, using the radar to determine the driveway's exact depth will mean the contractor won't accidentally dig too deeply and create openings in the soil beneath the driveway's sublayers. This, in turn, will mean you won't need to purchase soil and use it to fill these openings. Lastly, if the contractor knows the driveway's depth, they'll also be able to accurately determine how long the process of breaking it apart will take them. This, in turn, will help them to calculate the project's labour costs more accurately.
You need to do work to your house's foundation that contains rebar
If your home's foundation contains rebar and you need to have some work done to it (because for example, it's been damaged by subsidence), it might be worth getting the contractor to use a ground-penetrating radar on the foundation of the house before this work begins.
The reason for this is that the radar will indicate the location of the rebar and in doing so, will allow the contractor who will be working on the foundation to avoid striking the rebar with their jackhammer when they are repairing the foundation. This is important, as rebar is normally used to support a foundation. As such, if a contractor were to damage it or to hit it in a way that caused it to shift, this could cause additional foundation problems that might increase the costs, time and complexity of your original project.
In short, whilst renting a ground-penetrating radar and having the contractor scan the foundation with it might add a day or so to the project, and increase its costs slightly, using it has the potential to save you a lot of added stress overall.
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